Growing up, Amy (Tran) Swensen used to practice her goalkeeping skills by having her dad hit field hockey balls to her in their driveway.

“I remember, one time, him stopping and saying, ‘This could be it. This could be how you get to go to college. On a field hockey scholarship,’” Swensen said.

That epiphany would never have been possible without Title IX.

Just as her father predicted, Swensen went to college at North Carolina on a field hockey scholarship. Today, she’s one of a select few women who’ve successfully parlayed field hockey into a post-collegiate playing career.

Now 32, with 144 international caps to her name, Swensen is still widely acknowledged as the world’s best female field hockey goalkeeper.

The Northern Lebanon graduate has made field hockey last longer than most, but even as she gears up for her second Olympic Games with the U.S. field hockey team, she harbors hopes for a future where more women will get to have some of the experiences she has had in sports.

Because even though the opportunities for women to play sports at the high school and college levels have increased dramatically over the last four decades, the professional sports scene is still very much a man’s world.

“One of the hardest things about our sport is that once you’re done with high school or college or the national team, there’s not a lot of opportunities to play,” Swensen said. “It’s something USA Field Hockey considers a lot, and I would like for us to have a national [professional] league like that. That would be amazing.”

But at this point, that’s still very much a pipe dream. The WNBA still holds the distinction of being the only stable women’s professional sports league in the United States.

The question of “what comes next” is something Swensen tries not to think about — especially now, as the national team intensifies its preparations for London 2012.

“I haven’t looked ahead,” Swensen said. “This is a big year, and a hard year. We all try really hard to just focus on the Olympics.

“In fact, we were joking around — a lot of the girls who went through the 2008 Olympics — you go into a little bit of a depression afterward because you work so hard and so long and suddenly it’s over.”

Q&A with Amy Swensen:Q: When did you start to think that field hockey might be something you could do beyond high school?A: I was going into my junior year in high school when I realized I had a chance of playing in college. I was at a summer camp, and two national team goalies coached me, and they had both gone to North Carolina. It was their encouragement, and [them] taking the time to talk to me that made me believe in myself, that I could try to play in college. It was only when I was in college – my sophomore year – that I realized that if I wanted to continue to play after college, I could maybe make the national team.

Q: What does Title IX mean to you?A: Title IX gave me the opportunity to get a scholarship and go to a great college. Personally, it gave me a lot.